We Need Your Help

"Spread out," Leo said. "We're looking for sealed crates… Industrial, military, anything that didn't get crushed when the shelves went down."

They split up across the floor with their magnetic boots clacking over the debris.

Camila and Chloe took the overturned bins along the port wall. 

Harper and Ms. Tachibana worked through the surviving lower racks in the middle. 

Leo, Jin-Ah, and Elena headed for the back of the vault, where a heavy wire-mesh security cage had been built around a thick load-bearing pillar.

…The pillar had saved it.

Everything around the cage had been flattened, but the cage itself stood untouched, like the falling ceiling had politely stepped around it.

Inside, bolted onto a magnetic pallet, sat a single octagonal crate made of thick dark composite. 

A faint amber light on its seal was still blinking looking slow and tired.

"Over here!" Leo called. "Intact crate in the metallurgy cage!"

The others hurried over and gathered around the open front of the cage.

Leo grabbed the pressure latches on the rim and popped them one by one.

CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!

Then he heaved the heavy lid back.

Packed into dense preservation foam sat ten hexagonal bars of metal, each about the size of a thick brick.

They didn't look like any metal Leo had ever seen in an engineering lab…

The surface had a strange liquid-silver matte finish that seemed to swallow their lights instead of reflecting them. 

Running deep underneath it were fine web-like veins of dark iridescent blue that shifted and shimmered whenever the angle changed, like oil trapped under ice.

"Whoa..." Harper leaned over the rim, her visor glowing green against the bars. "What is that stuff? It looks like frozen mercury."

"There's no element code on it and no stamps," Jin-Ah said, scanning it with her wrist terminal. "My interface just reads 'Unclassified Metal.' Without proper equipment so I can't tell if it's degraded scrap or something useful."

"Move aside, amateurs."

Elena's crisp haughty voice cut in from behind them.

Before anyone could answer, she stepped between Harper and Camila and walked straight up to the crate.

And for the first time since the white light had taken them out of Room 402, the spoiled rage on her face drained away. 

…What replaced it was something none of them had seen before… It was focus.

Elena was sharp and completely sure of itself.

The faint emerald shimmer of Mechanical Attunement flared across the backs of her gloves.

She didn't just look at the bar. 

She picked one up, grunting a little at how heavy it was, nearly twenty kilos packed into something that small. She ran her thumb along the beveled edge then she tapped its corner sharply against the bar beside it.

There was no sound in the vacuum but the vibration ran straight up her wrists, and her talent drank it in.

Elena's eyes widened a fraction.

"This isn't scrap," she said slowly, and there was real, grudging respect in her voice. "Look at the grain along the bevel. There isn't a single pore in it… Whoever made this cast it in zero gravity and spun it while it cooled… The structure's perfectly even all the way through."

Everyone stared at her.

"In English, Sterling?" Harper prompted.

Elena shot her a withering look, though she kept holding the bar almost reverently.

"In English, for the uneducated… this is the best structural metal I have ever touched. It's denser than anything on Earth… You could fire a rifle at this from a meter away and the bullet would turn to dust before it left a mark." 

She paused, frowning. "And I have no idea what it is. I've never felt anything like it."

[This unit can help with that. The metal is refined Graventhal, the same material as this station's hull plating… The raw ore was mined out of the moon that shattered nearby. How a metal like this ended up inside an ordinary moon is not something this unit can explain. It should not be there but it simply is.]

"It should not be there," Camila repeated nervously. "That's... a really comforting sentence, thanks."

[You're welcome… This unit is a comfort machine.]

Elena set the bar back into the foam with a decisive click and crossed her arms, lifting her chin at Leo.

"Even with whatever the Foundry loses breaking it down, every one of these bars should give you at least two units of high-grade alloy… Probably more."

Leo looked at her for a long moment.

Despite himself, he was impressed. When she wasn't throwing a royal tantrum about her family name, Elena Sterling actually knew her stuff.

"Good eye, Elena," he said evenly, and gave her a real nod. "Seriously. That saves us from guessing what we're feeding the furnace."

Elena froze.

She'd clearly braced herself to trade insults, not to get a straight compliment from him. 

A faint awkward pink crept up her cheekbones, and she turned her head away with a stiff scoff.

"Obviously… Someone on this crew has to know basic metallurgy."

Harper bit her lip with her shoulders shaking. 

Camila hid her grin behind her glove. 

Even Chloe peeked out from behind Sensei, wide-eyed, like she'd just watched a cat accept a belly rub.

Leo stepped up to the crate and laid both palms flat against the cold veined bars.

"Alright. We came in here with zero out of fifty. Let's see what this gives us… Foundry Recall."

BZZZZZZZT… FLASH!

A blinding grid of azure lines erupted from his hands and swallowed the whole crate.

This time it didn't vanish instantly. 

The bars were so dense the grid strained against them for almost five full seconds, the blue light roaring and shuddering through the floor, before the metal finally broke apart into a thick swirling cyclone of particles and shot straight up through the ceiling.

Ding!

[Acquired: Refined Graventhal Ingots x10]

[High-Grade Alloy: 20 / 50]

[Ship Power: 76% ➔ 66%]

A second panel popped up right underneath, yellow and unamused.

[The Master Captain is reminded that dragging ten bricks of impossible metal through two hundred and forty meters of station is not free… Every recall like that costs ship power, and the ship does not grow more of it on trees, This unit would also like to remind the Captain that there are no trees.]

Harper snorted loudly.

"Damn, Cap… First it roasts Jin, now it's giving you a lecture on physics… This ship has zero chill."

"I'd rather have a snarky computer than a dead battery," Ms. Tachibana said, though a small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth then she looked at the counter floating in the corner of everyone's visor, and the smile faded. "Twenty… Almost halfway, Leo. Let's find the rest."

"Right," Leo nodded, turning back to the wreckage. "Spread out again. Check every cage and every rack that's still standing. We need thirty more units… fifteen more of those bars."

They fanned out with new urgency.

Harper and Chloe worked down the starboard rows, with Chloe lifting fallen racks a meter off the floor so Harper could shine her light underneath. 

Camila and Ms. Tachibana searched the side enclosures along the back wall.

Jin-Ah found a half-crushed terminal podium near the center pillar, pried its access panel off, and plugged her wrist cable straight into it.

Three minutes passed… Then five…

Every crate Harper looked under was either empty or full of shattered ceramic and corroded bolts.

[Low-grade scrap… Not useful, Please stop showing this unit garbage.]

The cages Camila checked held nothing but cracked barrels of frozen lubricant.

Finally, Jin-Ah went still.

"Leo," she said quietly. "Stop searching."

Everyone paused and turned their lights toward her.

"What did you find, Jin?" Leo asked, walking over.

"The depot's inventory log." She frowned at the screen. "Or I think it is. It's all in that spiral script."

[Allow this unit. Translating the quartermaster's final log.]

["Twelve crates of refined Graventhal requisitioned for Sub-Level 6 during the vault retrofit... Nine crates used to reinforce the vault walls… Two crates lost when the supply barge detonated at the upper docking ring and one crate delivered intact and stored in the metallurgy cage."]

[That one crate is the one the Master Captain just recalled so there are no others.]

A heavy silence fell over the channel.

"Wait... what?" Camila's voice cracked as she looked around the huge ruined room. "There aren't any more?! We're only at twenty! We're still thirty short!"

"That makes no sense!" Harper kicked a corroded bolt across the floor. 

It went spinning off into the dark. "When we saw this place from the ship, the objective tab said a hundred and fifty units of alloy! A hundred and fifty! How can there only be ten bars in the whole damn depot?!"

"Did the system miscalculate?" Ms. Tachibana murmured, tapping her chin. "No... It's been brutally precise about everything so far. If it said a hundred and fifty units were on this station, then the metal is physically here… Somewhere."

Leo didn't answer.

He was standing very still in the middle of the aisle.

'Nine crates used to reinforce the vault walls.'

His eyes drifted away from the empty cage.

Slowly, he tilted his head back, and his lights traveled up the massive seamless ribs and the thick dark-grey armor plates that made up the walls of the vault itself.

Liquid-silver matte… Swallowing the light… Faint shifting veins of blue running underneath…

'The same material as this station's hull plating.'

A slow unhinged grin spread across Leo's face.

He walked over to the wall beside the cage and slapped his gloved palm flat against the smooth dark metal.

"The system didn't lie to us," he said, his voice ringing clearly through the channel. "And the alloy isn't missing…"

He tapped the wall twice.

"We're standing inside it."

[Confirmed. This unit could have told you that a while ago… This unit wanted to see whether the Master Captain would work it out on his own. Congratulations, it took him nine minutes, which is faster than this unit had bet against itself.]

Harper blinked, looking from his hand to the towering wall. "Wait... you mean..."

"Those nine crates weren't lost… They bolted every bar of it straight into the vault." Leo unclipped the plasma torch from his belt and hefted it. "These walls are solid Graventhal."

He looked up at the twelve-meter wall of seamless armor then back at the crew.

"There are no more crates," he said calmly. "So we cut it out of the station."

At the edge of the cage, Elena's eyes went as wide as dinner plates.

For two full seconds, her brain completely stalled. 

She looked from the torch in his hand to the wall behind him. 

A wall holding up thirty-four stories of tilted, broken tower directly above their heads.

"Absolutely not!"

She stepped in front of the wall and threw her arms out, like she was shielding a sacred monument from a barbarian with a sledgehammer.

"Are you clinically insane?!" Her voice spiked into an outraged shriek. "Look at the ceiling trusses! Look at the angle on the expansion joints! This entire tower is leaning on this vault! If you start hacking random slabs out of these walls like a butcher carving a roast, the load will shift in less than ten seconds, and the whole tower comes down on our heads! We won't be crushed, Kaine! We'll be paste!"

"Then we don't cut random slabs," Leo said evenly.

He lowered the torch a few centimeters, though he didn't clip it back on.

Then he stepped closer, until his visor was barely half a meter from hers, and his eyes dropped to her gloves. 

…To the faint green shimmer that had been dancing over them a minute ago.

"That's why you're going to tell us which ones are safe."

Elena's tirade stalled mid-breath. "...Excuse me?"

"Your talent," Jin-Ah said from beside the podium, narrowing her eyes. "Mechanical Attunement… You just read the inner structure of that ingot through your glove, without a single scanner and you felt the grain too."

"So if you put your hands on these walls," Leo finished, "you can feel where the weight's going. You can tell which plates are just extra armor bolted on during that retrofit… and which ones are actually holding the ceiling up."

Silence fell over the depot as six helmet lights slowly turned toward Elena and she stared at Leo for three long seconds.

Then a cold triumphant smirk curled the corners of her mouth. 

She crossed her arms tight over her chest and tilted her chin up at a very sharp angle.

"Oh, I see," she drawled, every syllable dripping with satisfaction. "First the mighty Master Captain muzzles me on the bridge like a dog, so his fragile ego doesn't have to hear criticism… And now, the moment his caveman tactics hit a literal wall, he suddenly needs the grease monkey to save his life."

She leaned her shoulder lightly against the cage mesh and looked down her nose at him.

"No."

The word hung there in the dead air of the vault.

[Oh, this unit has been waiting for this… Please, continue, This unit has nothing better to do than keep every one of you breathing.]